23
2015
What is the cost of doing nothing?
According to the Human Potential Project, “There is an insidious and silent killer of productivity and profitability that is affecting your P&L every year. For some this will be measured in millions, for others in billions.” What they were referring to is the high cost of maintaining their status quo and doing nothing. This dilemma isn’t new; it’s been around since the beginning of time….
04
2015
Use It, or Lose It!
One of the biggest problems with any kind of training today is that what is learned in those training classes is lost in a very short period of time. According to findings by the International Journal of Project Management, “Around 40% of the knowledge acquired in training is lost after 1 month, rising to 90% after 6 months.” Those statistics shouldn’t be a surprise to…
09
2015
Can you fill the Knowledge Gap when you have Unexpected Vacancies?
What happens when you have an employee that has mission-critical knowledge and all of a sudden they are unexpectedly gone? It’s the unexpected part that always catches us by surprise, isn’t it? I mean who plans to get sick, injured, have a family emergency, be in an accident, or even die? But it happens every day in our business lives. So, can you fill the…
04
2015
The Problem When Knowledge Isn’t Shared
Has this ever happened in your organization where you discover that because departments don’t capture and share their knowledge, they do the same process completely different? What was the outcome? Which group followed corporate or operational guidelines? Who didn’t? Was there an inherent flaw on the way one group performed over the other? Why in the world would one group have one process or protocol…
10
2015
How will the Skilled Worforce Shortage Affect Your Business?
A good friend and mentor of mine, Jeff Klingberg, President and CEO of The Mountain Stream Group, in Chicago, www.mountainstreamgroup.com has been sharing some really important insight into what’s going on in the world of manufacturing today. Jeff’s engineering background, and our discussions regarding knowledge management and capturing corporate knowledge led him to forward me Plant Engineering 2014 Workforce Development Study: 6 key findings, by…
27
2015
What Is It Costing You When Your People Can’t Get What They Need, Right When They Need It?
We all know that “Time is Money” right? Well, how much money do you think your company is wasting when your employees can’t find what they need to do their job, right when they need it? Go ahead, take a guess. There are a number of research papers out there that have said the average employee spends upwards of 8 hours per week searching for…
21
2015
Build a Better Buyer Business Case
Mike Schultz and John Doerr of the RAIN Groupwrote an excellent white paper recently on What Sales Winners Do Differently. In this paper they did some interesting research around what winners of more than 700 B-to-B sales opportunities did differently. The three things they outlined that were significantly different were that winners: “Connect the dots between customer needs and their company’s products and services and…
05
2015
What if you took a Small Bite out of Big Data?
According to Wikipedia: “Big Data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications. The challenges include analysis, curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization and privacy violations.” They go on to say: “the world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the…
22
2014
Do You Provide a One-Size-Fits-All Approach?
Have you ever noticed that some organizations appear to have a one-size-fits-all approach to their: Customer’s Problems, Sales Campaigns, Marketing Campaigns and Collateral and Product Development? Why is that? Well, I believe that it is due to the lack of understanding of what their customers need. I believe that there is a lack of alignment between those sales, marketing and product development departments and their…
01
2014Are Your Prospects Deaf, Dumb & Blind to Their Own Problems?
I find it very interesting that there are a lot of people out there who appear to be deaf, dumb and blind to the problems that exist within their own organization. It’s either that or they simply don’t want to hear, see, or talk about them, or admit that they actually have them. When you encounter a prospect like this, it makes you wonder if…